About Me

I live in DC, sail the Chesapeake Bay, have a lovely wife who's a web designer, a young son, an unruly hound dog, and am interested in most everything in the world. Oh yea, and I love the smell of burning trash in the Third World. That just gets me going.

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Found my new hobby: raising 2,000 shrimp in 55 gallon drums.

My friend Chris became obsessed with marine biology when he was a little kid. By his early teens, he had a sizeable collection of dead fish in plastic pretzel containers filled with formaldehyde stacked in his parents' garage next to rusty bikes and old weight lifting equipment. Imagine making eye contact with a channel catfish suspended vertically in a murky white solution, eyes bulging, whiskers askew.

Chris's obsession eventually landed him a job working on a shrimp farm in Gila Bend, Arizona. Summer temperatures that regularly hit 110 degrees may not appeal to you, but Chris was in his element, living in a jacked-up trailer beside hectare-sized shrimp ponds and plowing foot-deep muck with a backhoe between harvests.

Now Chris lives in the DC area and is itching to get back in the shit, and who better to help him than me.

It takes a full day of physical labor and multiple truck trips to transport thirty-three 55 gallon drums across Maryland, but since we're on a budget, that kind of work is the only option.

And it's surprisingly easy to get a permit. The Maryland DNR guy casually chatted by phone about obtaining import and project licenses and there are no fees for any of it.

We're looking at renting a basement to begin rearing 2,000 Michigan-bought Pacific White Shrimp larvae (shrimp are essentially insects) for next spring. It should take four months to have fully grown adults and then we're gonna have a barbeque like you never saw.

If you like shrimp, and you're not busy next August, I'll help you fill your damn belly.